Digging deeper: using implicit tests to define consumers’ semantic network
Pierrick Rivière
Danone Research
Caroline Cuny
Grenoble Ecole de Management
Gaël Allain
Cabinet Mémoire & Marketing
Carel Vereijken
Danone Research
Introduction
A persistent piece of conventional wisdom suggests that people’s choices are deliberate, and that if market researchers ask consumers why they have chosen a certain brand or prefer a certain package, they can draw conclusions that can then be translated into marketing actions. But this view overlooks the substantial unconscious aspects of decision-making processes (Bargh 2002; Köster 2003). In particular, information stored in consumers’ memory often is not consciously...